“You’ve got to have a good beginning,” Roger Corman told Scorsese as he prepared to shoot BOXCAR BERTHA, “because the audience wants to know what it’s about, and you’ve got to have a good ending, because they want to know how it all turned out. Nothing in between really matters.”

Scorsese would later call this, “The best sense I ever heard in pictures,” but at that time he was only able to fulfil the latter half of the success formula. BB opens with a really pathetic biplane crash (obviously an AIP feature could afford to crash a plane for real, so Scorsese cuts to horrified onlookers – he would make up for this in THE AVIATOR), but it ends with a cattle car crucifixion and a really dynamic shotgun massacre which has clearly been storyboarded and then executed faithfully – the wildest shot is the trackback POV of a guy who’s just been blasted off his feet by the shotgun. Compared to the bloodbath that climaxes TAXI DRIVER, it’s very cartoony, but effective. (And during the shoot, Barbara Hershey gave him a copy of Nikos Kazantzakis’ The Last Temptation of Christ.)

Scorsese’s struggle to maintain quality in his low-budget period romp is interesting to bear in mind when watching DILLINGER, which proved to be the best John Milius film I’ve ever seen. It never feels like they didn’t have enough time or money to do what they wanted to do, there are spectacular sequences (gun battles to beat HEAT) and beautiful shots, and not a bad performance in it – a considerable feet for a movie with scores of speaking parts, an inexperienced director, and a limited budget.

The very first shot (top) made Fiona cheer, and packs in more excitement and movie-star charisma than the whole ninety hours of Michael Mann’s PUBLIC ENEMIES – and it’s all done with Warren Oates’ expressive kisser and impactful comicbook composition. The Oates countenance: a kind of tapioca mudslide, like the bags under his eyes decided to strike out and form a face of their own. Everything is yielding to gravity, as if only loosely fastened to the crumbly skull beneath, and yet there’s a contradictory sense of hardness and permanence that stops you from thinking he’s about to disintegrate and pool on the floor this instant. The impression is of a real tough guy who can kill everyone in the joint between cigar puffs, but who carries his own eventual dissolution wrapped up inside that bullish carcass.

Milius/Oates’ Dillinger is amoral, charming and forceful, just as he should be. I did feel the lack of a real love story — what’s missing is an intro scene to the relationship with Billie Frechette (Michelle Philips — the plain one from the Mamas and the Papas — who has a great rake-thin 1930s shape and a great 1970s slouch) — Milius admitted not being too great at writing women, I believe. Here the couple just slap each other and he tears her dress off, and it’s rather hard to read this as the beginning of a great love story or anything other than plain brutality. As with most Milius films, there’s greater interest in bromance.

The real passion is between Dillinger and Melvin Purvis (Ben Johnson), the G-man who was sworn to smoke a cigar over his bullet-ridden corpse. The balance between twin protagonists — a device Milius tried again in THE WIND AND THE LION — works well here because it helps stop the story being purely a glorification of Dillinger. Despite the horror of the shoot-outs, JM probably IS in love with his outlaw protag (going on his form elsewhere) but we get to opt out if we want. It’s necessary, I think, to like Conan, but it’s not necessary to like Dillinger — you can get away with just finding him interesting, a compelling problem for society to solve.

In one nice, mythic scene, Melvin Purvis fails to impress a small boy at a shoeshine, demonstrating that being a G-man is nowhere near as cool (or lucrative) as being an outlaw. Especially if the outlaw is called Dillinger and the G-man is called Melvin Purves. This isn’t enough to motivate the man’s later suicide, but it’s one note of unease more than Michael Mann thought to supply — in his movie, it’s a complete mystery why he chose to disclose this fact about Purves (a very minor nonentity in his film).

Kurosawa influence (see also CONAN) very much in view — Johnson walks into a house where a bandit is staked out, we hear screams and shots, and the bloodied perp staggers out and dies — NOT in slomo, however. Milius evidently felt there was a limit to what he could steal. That’s what makes him different from his hero, I guess.

I was talking about this celebrated bit from Antonioni’s L’ECLISSE to students the other day (it allowed me to steal Benny Hill’s joke about knowing how to spell Antonioni but not knowing when to stop) and I thought I’d write it up.

So, at this point in the film, Monica Vitti and Alain Delon have met several times at this particular location. On this occasion, neither one of them turns up. But Antonioni, who is nothing if not diligent, does, and presents us with what happens, or fails to happen. The scene, a movie deprived of its stars, resembles a documentary in some ways (because those could be foolishly defined as movies without stars) but is obviously created with complete care and artifice. Without any real subject, it becomes about time passing. It’s also possessed of a various narrative tension, which I will try to unravel.

“If you want reality, go out and look at the street corner — it’s boring!” Orson Welles once told an actor in the theatre. And Orson DID NOT care for Antonioni’s movies, denouncing the maestro’s tendency to linger on things. Though he may well have been thinking of the last shot of THE PASSENGER, a long take very different in effect from those in his own works, and one that takes forever to imperceptibly deliver a startling conclusion in a quite indirect way, this scene, a portrait of a street corner, would seem to be Welles’ nightmare come to life. Why do I find it so electrifying? Even when extracted by Martin Scorsese for his Voyage to Italy documentary, it thrills.

Antonioni opens (cutting directly from the previous scene, which DOES feature Vitti) to a nursemaid pushing a pram, then pans to a view of the construction site with water jetting in front of it. The particularities of the view, especially the space-age structure in the distance, already hint that a street corner might be more interesting than it sounds. The perverse pan, motivated by nothing we can understand, takes us away from the most human part of the shot, the nanny, and shows us, arguably, nothing. So we’re aware of the camera’s behaviour already — like the prowling lurker of a horror movie, it has its own will and roves about, unseen by the pedestrians, intent on business of its own.

Antonioni now follows a stratagem repeated throughout the sequence, cutting in to a detail — often, this is a detail established in a wider view, but here, the heap of concrete misshapes (a miniature city of the future, a Max Ernst decalcomaniacal landscape) is merely something whose existence we might infer from the previous picture. Like the good little slaves of Kuleshov that we are, we are forced to assume a connection between the two.

MA then serves up a wooden fence, retreating at sharp perspective, and by now a definite tension is building. This looks like a shot that should be inhabited. And we’ve had what ought to have served as an establishing shot, then two detail shots, and still nothing. Because film scenes by definition are supposed to have things happening in them, an audience in 1962 as today would surely start to feel antsy around now.

A drum of water. Tied to the previous shot by the fenceposts running by it. And a shot that can’t really be expected to contain any actors at all, unless Delon is suddenly going to surface wearing a snorkel. So, an establishing shot and THREE details. The audience may justifiably feel that this scene is allowed one last chance to resolve into a series of reported events. Also, Antonioni may have displayed the first of several influences —

1) — would be Ozu, who famously uses shots that are positioned somewhat like establishing shots but which refuse to behave exactly right. If, as DePalma has argued, “establishing shots are a waste of time,” (he has a point — if all the shot is doing is setting the scene, you haven’t chosen an effective beginning), then Ozu’s shots waste far too much time to even qualify as establishing shots. They take us on a dance through space, as Antonioni has just done with his building site / breeze blocks / fence barrel juxtapositions.

2) — would be my man Lewis Milestone, who uses a similar shot of a water barrel as part of a sequence of details at the start of RAIN — details which recurs as the film goes on, showing the passage of time via the developing rainstorm. Though experimental up to a point, Milestone’s inserts conform sufficiently to Hollywood narrative norms by virtue of being brief.

Ahah! thinks the poor audience, as Antonioni tilts from the can of water, panning slightly — he’s going somewhere, something’s up — and he winds up with THIS composition —

Wonderfully bleak and denatured. A shot that positively screams out for a passer-by to give it meaning, intent, direction. It’s not even ideally frames as a shot of a zebra crossing. There’s a tree AND a sign in the way. The lady with the pram now a distant memory, this begins to feel like Rome after a neutron bomb strike.

3) Stanley Kramer’s ON THE BEACH came out in 1959. It’s vast shots of an empty city are memorable, and rather surreal, since the concept of the neutron bomb didn’t even exist at the time.

Modernism! This low-angle on the half-constructed building shrouded in a weird wicker-like covering manages to suggest a definite POV of an unseen spectator and a likeness to a modern art abstract sculpture. How does Antonioni really feel about brutalist architecture? I know it’s a vital symbol of the anomie he anatomizes, but he’s so visually excited by it that I can’t believe he doesn’t love it a little too — like Tati and the gadgets and towers of Tativille. Would you give your name to a fictional city you didn’t love? Is there a street or apartment complex or multi-storey car park named after Antonioni? There should be.

The next shots dance around the site’s scaffolding, the upper reaches of which form a naked skeleton of a building as seen by X-Ray Milland, or a climbing frame for giants. Clouds drift, the most alive things we have seen lately.

And then Antonioni returns to street level, without the aid of a visual link, signalling the start of a new movement in this near-silent city symphony. A tree. Empty space behind it. And then a horse and buggy canters through frame, pulling our eye left, where we pause to pick up the nanny and pram again, a clue that this has not been a montage of empty hours, but is an ongoing glimpse in near-real time of a quiet street. The sudden fast action and a shot which, for a few seconds at least, actually follows a subject matter, startle us awake.

Shadows of trees on the ground. A lovely frame, but in my DVD at least, it’s a freeze-frame, a still photograph, with big un-moving grain, making it stick out rather unattractively. Oh well, as Sidney Lumet once said, “Nothing has to be perfect.” The next shot, artfully lit asphalt, makes up for it.

A real horror movie image — peeking from behind one side of a kind of shed-like structure on the building site, with just a sliver of street visible, Antonioni tracks laterally past the building in order to peek from the other side. Hiding behind stuff (like Sidney Furie, or an Indian), when coupled with an unmotivated, prowling camera move, says ALIEN to me. A bunch of iron guard-rails look like the kind of things you see in cities without suggesting to me a definite purpose. They make me nervous.

The zebra-stripes on the road finally get their own product shot, only to be upstaged by a stocky chap in a suit who walks right across them, with a determined gait, and out of the film. Goodbye! Goodbye!

Oh — we revisit the fence, and there goes what looks to be the same chap, still bent on escape. Will we pursue him further? We will not — the trees in the background have begun to billow about, Antonioni having brought in some aircraft propellers (NONE of this stuff is accidental, I tell you!) and this motivates a clear cut to the leafy branches undulating and sussurating and inspiring David Lynch. And that leads logically yet intuitively to a closeup of gnarly bark, crawling with ants.

The sudden cut to a high angle could be seen as a new movement beginning, but it’s actually connected to the previous image by a more abstract thread. The tree bark looks like an expansive rocky landscape seen from the air, with the ants scurrying about like those Viennese fairground customers Harry Lime thought so little of. So the jump to the very highest angle yet forms an intuitive link with ant-land. Look, here comes a bus! I sense another influence —

4) NORTH BY NORTHWEST. We know Hitchcock was well impressed with Antonioni and planned a pervy colour-supplement style movie, KALEIDOSCOPE, in which he would attempt to outdo the maestro. Did the influence run the other way? Well, I would argue that the concept of BLOW UP — a photographer may have witnessed a murder — perhaps owes something to REAR WINDOW. For most of its running time, REAR WINDOW is an exercise in ambiguity, with the offscreen events tantalisingly unknowable. BLOW UP drags the ambiguity out past the end of the film. In NXNW, Hitch created abstract suspense out of Cary Grant waiting for a bus on a prairie. We have reason to suspect he will be attacked, but no clue is offered as to how. Each time a possible avenue of narrative interest is produced (a car passes, another car stops, a man gets out to wait for another bus, the bus comes), the film shuts it down. Until the crop-duster attacks, but I would imagine Antonioni would lose interest at that point.

So, a bus is coming. Antonioni starts to tilt down to follow it. But then he gets carried away and tilts so far he loses the bus altogether. He looks at the zebra crossing again. We wait for the bus to pass through frame. Antonioni cuts before it can. But he cuts to the bus, or to *a* bus, anyway, one that has parked and is now moving off. A wide shot shows us just how empty the place is without it.

The rain barrel is leaking! The floating matchbox and stick will soon be deposited at the bottom. This is possibly the most exciting thing to have happened so far. How did the steel drum spring such a dramatic leak? An actual event appears to have happened while we were preoccupied with that bus, like bloody fools. A second shot from outside the barrel and from the other side of the fence shows the water spouting and puddling, and we track with the flowing fluid, according it a narrative import that bus apparently didn’t merit. We end on the gutter.

People! But only up to a point. Figures, more than characters. The bloke is so far to the right we know he’s of marginal significance. She’s so still and small we take a moment to spot her. The flat architectural view and the further flattening of the long lens and deep focus make the pair seem like a dwarf and a giant. Both seem to be waiting. Another waiting lady ponders what it all means. She seems to be at a bus stop. You just missed it, lady!

Scowling woman. Out of focus behind her, a woman leans out on their balcony. A distant detail that feels almost accidental, as if accidents were possible in this designed mise-en-scene. Her new posture frames her perfectly through the intermediate foliage. A second shot shows the pensive scowler standing off the curb, handbag dangling. Stood up? We know the feeling. You might have been stood up for a movie, miss, but have you ever been stood up BY a movie? As she turns, hopefully, a bright flash pops up for a frame or two almost in the centre of the image. A flaw in the film, a momentary reflection, or something more numinous?

The bus passes. It’s not what she’s waiting for, but we get an ominous shot of its wheels. Antonioni sets up a peaceful shot of poplars in front of the apartment blocks, then rudely occludes it with the bus, hissing into shot and disgorging passengers, one of whom opens a newspaper and flashes us a headline about some ongoing atomic conference, where no doubt the Russians and Americans are trying to agree how many ICBMs it takes to destroy all life on earth and how many more than that each of them needs. This slightly leaden bit of political reference does make me think I was right to think that the H-bomb was partly on Antonioni’s mind with the depopulated frames. THE ATOMIC RACE. THE PEACE IS WEAK. The chap breezes off with his doomsday rag into a vista that suddenly reminds me of the futuristic London in George Pal’s THE TIME MACHINE, right before it gets obliterated by nuclear death from above. In the distance, children are playing.

So Antonioni leaps in close to them and shows them running through the water spray, which we had quite forgotten about. Has it been jetting away all this time? In long-shot, a workman arrives and shuts it off. It was too much fun for this movie. BEAUTIFUL shot of hedgerow leaves dripping with droplets, glistening — this takes us to a big shaggy tree with lamp-post and nice blocky modern apartment building making lego shapes against the sky — Antonioni can’t resist jumping in and offering up closer views of some of those staired shapes. In three cuts he seems to ascend the building and ends on the sky with radio tower and vapour trail slicing across. Back on the building, somebody points. “Look, boss, the plane! The plane!” The vespertine atmos is so dreamy its overwhelming. So crepuscular it’s almost muscular.

The next shot has us plunged back to the base of this building. And then a woman enters shot. Her hair is like Monica Vitti’s hair! It must be Monica Vitti, from behind. You know when you wait for somebody and get crosser and crosser when they’re late, but then when they show up you can’t help forgetting to tell them off because you like them and you’re glad to see them? but then she turns around and it’s not Monica Vitti at all, and we get that uncanny lurch like that time when I was four and got lost in the supermarket and the woman I thought was mummy turned round and wasn’t mummy. The non-Vitti woman has a spectacularly disappointing face. The poor woman must have been hand-picked out of thousands. Still, at least she’s not a dwarf in a mac with a butcher’s knife.

Big ECU of the contents of the draining drum. Makes me think of Godard’s coffee cup, macro view like a spiral galaxy disintegrating in the heat death of the universe.

Huge views of sidewalk, shallow water surging across in little ripples magnified to seem like great swells.

Big shot of neck and jowl. Something of a shock, and only the giant size seems to link it to the previous moments. MA follows it with a giant spectacle — I don’t mean like the explosion at the end of ZABRISKIE POINT, I mean literally a huge one half of a pair of spectacles, a close-up detail of the owner of the neck. Then a big head, spiraling up from bottom of frame, allowing us to enjoy the neck and specs in context. The epic treatment of a person is exhilarating, and just when you think it can’t get any better, Antonioni afford the fellow a medium shot, a low angle in which his turtle-like head seems dwarfed b its suited body, a bit like the crazy image of Spike the mutant baby poking tadpole-fashion from a gaping collar in ERASERHEAD. The momentary star of the show walks off and we reframe on a nice couple of trees.

That draining water has created mud. And a kind of fissure in the earth’s surface, its size impossible to determine. A tiny crack suitable for an ant, or a vast sinkhole ready to swallow an apartment complex.

A baby. Waiting. In a pram. What, you’re still here? It feels like the evening has advanced considerably, but baby’s day out is still in progress. Nanny pushes off. The sun is low in the sky, pushing through a blotch of cloud, silhouetting the sports field floodlights.

A woman looks up, her face framed through bars. A streetlight comes on — always a magical event if you happen to be there to spot it (despite living in a city, I hardly ever seem to see this daily event happen).

Wide shot of broad avenue, busier, darker, with streetlights on. Abruptly it’s quieter. A bus drives through, alone. Leaving emptiness again. We discover it parked around the corner. A small crowd disembarks and we follow their dispersing backs into the urban gloaming.

A magical image of night — photographed late magic hour so the sky is still faintly illumined so as to outline the city. Another pan off to the side, following nothing, drawn by forces unknown.

The abrupt, violent glare of a street light in ECU, washing out it’s surroundings.

The only problem I had with THE WOLF OF WALL STREET really is that it’s the same story as GOODFELLAS, and the earlier film is a more stylistically varied film (fast pace but also long takes) and benefits from Scorsese’s greater intimacy with the social scene depicted. (If, as Scorsese argues, nobody but an Italian-American should have been allowed to tackle that subject, arguably a WASP should’ve helmed WOLF). But that’s largely where my quibbling ends — the movie is rambunctious and loud and relentless, and I kept wondering how it could fill its running time this way, since it seemed to have reached a climax of excess before the first hour was up, but it keeps finding reasons to move forward in propulsive bulges, reminding me of the mutated Tetsuo in Katsushiro Otomo’s AKIRA, an obscene caterpillar of psychotic bloat.

I don’t get why this movie’s attitude to its subject should be any more controversial than GOODFELLAS’ portrayal of the gangster lifestyle, awash with blood and cocaine and tacky furnishings and delicious-looking sauces. Scorsese has clearly articulated his philosophy of showing not telling, which in the stories he chooses means not editorializing or moralizing but making a moral point apparent by being truthful about the essence of something (even while frequently fictionalizing details). So you don’t have a cop make a speech like Huston was forced to do in THE ASPHALT JUNGLE — the closest to that here is the subway scene which makes a point of contrasting the lifestyle of the honest FBI agent played by Kyle Chandler, with what we’ve already seen of Jordan Belfort/Leo DiCaprio’s world, and what we’re about to see of his soft prison time. But this, like the film’s final shot, is accomplished visually, not by making speeches. The only speeches made are to represent what the characters think or pretend they think, not to allow the filmmaker a podium. This is known as treating the audience as adults.

Like GOODFELLAS, the film’s moral standing is perhaps compromised or tainted by the fact that its subject is still at large and benefiting from his crimes, but GOODFELLAS would seem in some way the more problematic case. Henry Hill was this gangster who apparently never killed anybody, but just happened to be there when people got killed, or was involved in jobs where most of the other participants subsequently wound up killed. He’s our storyteller, so we have to take his version of events, which doesn’t exactly paint him sympathetically but does differentiate him from his more murderous buddies. Whereas, if Jordan Belfort was guilty of more outrageous abuses than are presented onscreen, it’s hard to imagine what they could be. His only possible moral edge over Ray Liotta’s character is that Belfort tries to save his best friend from the consequences of Belfort’s stool-pigeonry. But even this is portrayed as another example of his treachery (to the FBI) and stupidity. “You just learned the two most important lessons in life: never rat on your friends, and always keep your mouth shut.” I always loved that line in GOODFELLAS, it’s so dumb: the two lessons are exactly the same thing. And are disregarded as soon as it’s convenient.

Others have also pointed out the stunning physical comedy perpetrated by DiCaprio during the quaalude abuse scene — I just have to echo that because it would be criminal not to. Flailing, writhing, attempting to walk on his shoulders while flat on his belly, the actor achieves a liquid spasticity undreamt-of by the nuttiest of professors (check out his comedy dancing too). This may be the first time Scorsese has appropriated from Jerry Lewis, even though he DIRECTED Jerry Lewis. And the pay-off to this bit involves an unreliable narrator gag in which the scene is rewritten before our eyes — a joke touched on at the outset of the film when Belfort’s Ferrari changes colour in one shot from Ferris Bueller red to Don Johnson white, because it’s important to Belfort that these details are correct. And that little CGI joke seemed to come from nowhere and vanish into nowhere, until it comes back to sideswipe your brain two hours later. VERY nice work from screenwriter Terence Winter (Boardwalk Empire).

Haven’t seen AMERICAN HUSTLE yet (I will!) so can’t comment on the other hot topic, “Which is the better Martin Scorsese movie?” Though I do have my own opinion about who has the better right to make Martin Scorsese movies.